“It’s common to replace these after a period of time, so we do have that scheduled in our upcoming outage,” Young said. “While the plant’s offline, we’ll also be conducting a regular refueling outage, where we've replaced about a third of the fuel rods in the reactor core and do other maintenance inspections on other components at the plant.”

Young says the project is expected to bring $108 million to the region and $150 million to the state.

She says she can’t disclose how long the project will take for competitive reasons, but says the plant will be out of service longer than during the usual maintenance, which is about 30 days.